Reg felt Faith’s presence the minute she stepped into the room. He was shocked by how quickly the infusion was working. His senses were already much, much sharper. Perhaps the addition of an isomer of Cortexiphan to the mixture was responsible. Frank and Tony had been ecstatic, and Reg was wondering if he’d even need the second treatment.

None of that was important, though. Faith’s presence won out over everything. She was here. She’d come after all. Charity had reassured everyone that Faith would show up, but Reg had been far from certain.

Why wasn’t she moving deeper into the room? He expected her to make her way to where Honor, Glory, and Charity sat, chatting up a storm in telepathy. Soon he’d be able to make out the words. So far, the buzz of the energy was much louder.

Amazement and relief had coursed through him when the screen began lighting up half an hour before. White lights meant someone in the compound was keying their agreement with full amnesty. Tonight was long overdue. If he hadn’t been overseas, he’d have found a way to intervene on the heels of the rebellion. And he should have been more proactive once he was home.

Would haves and should haves don’t buy much.

He’d kept a close eye on Faith’s energy, still expecting her to join her friends, the women who were like sisters to her. When she began edging out of the room, he sprinted after her. No way was she leaving before they had a chance to talk.

“Faith!” he cried once he was outside the room.

For a long, gut-wrenching moment, he was afraid she was going to bolt. If she did, he’d go after her, but the odds of him catching her weren’t good. Not yet. The infusion needed more time to alter his physiology.

She ground to a halt but didn’t turn. Hell, she didn’t even look up. Confusion—and shame—streamed from her in multihued waves of light.

“Is it so bad you can’t even look at me?” The words tore out of him. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you any more uncomfortable than I already have.”

She did look up then and turned to face him, her green eyes liquid with pain. “You don’t owe me any apologies. That should go the other way around. I’ve been a worse hypocrite than the Nameless Ones I professed to be so much better than. At least they were honest about feeling superior to everyone else. I hid behind every slight, every wrong word. Hell, I made myself quite the martyr.”

“It’s all right. I should’ve told you about myself well before we ended up in bed together.” He angled his head to one side and held out his arms, yearning to feel her against him.

She shook her head. “I’m not done. What I did earlier was more about me than about you. I needed to pull my head out of my ass long enough to see that.” She tilted her chin. “The hard truth is I might not have if Charity didn’t stop by. I haven’t treated her fairly, either. At first, I distanced myself because of her unstable genome—almost as if it was contagious.”

Reg dropped his arms to his sides. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“No. I’m being honest—for the first time maybe ever. After Charity got better, I kind of avoided her because of Tony being a Nameless One. She never held it against me, but she’s a better person than I am. And then when Frank made it clear he was interested in me, I could have been nicer saying no. Instead I was abrupt. Made it clear he was subhuman because of being a Nameless One.

“Jesus!” She shook her head. “I was awful.”

Reg fought with himself, told himself to hold his tongue, but he had to know, so he asked, “Do you like Frank?”

Faith’s eyes widened. “Oh hell, no. Not that way. But that’s not a reason for me to treat him like yesterday’s garbage. He took a chance accepting Milton’s amnesty offer, and he’s turned himself inside out working hard for the CIA. I should respect him for that. And I do.”

“But you don’t love him?” Reg persisted.

“No. And you shouldn’t love me. Not after how I behaved.”

Reg closed the distance between them. She might not accept his embrace, but he needed to touch her, so he dropped his hands onto her shoulders, reveling in the feel of her beneath his fingertips.

“Those things I said while I stood outside your bathroom door feeling like the worst kind of fool are all true. Nothing’s changed.”

Her gaze skittered away from his. “I don’t deserve you—or anyone, really. Not until I get my act together.”

He tightened his hold on her. “I was kicking myself hard when I left your place. Blaming myself. Rehashing all the mistakes I’d made.” He shrugged. “No one is perfect. Not me. Not you. I still want you. I haven’t given up hope that you’ll be my woman, my wife. I was afraid you’d never talk with me again, but I was going to show up on your doorstep and not leave until you let me inside.”

“Really?” She did look up at him then, her eyes shiny with tears.

“Really.” When he moved his hands from her shoulders and circled her body with his arms, she didn’t draw away.

Faith leaned into him. “What you did for my people, for the freaks—”

“Uh-uh,” he broke in. “GAs. Short for genetically altered. I want that one modification well underway before everyone from the compounds converges on Washington D.C. They’re full partners in this. Not some genetic aberration.”

“What you did for the GAs,” she went on, her voice partially muffled in his shoulder, “was unprecedented. Thank you.”

He cradled the back of her head in one hand. She was going to give them another chance. He felt it in the press of her body against him. A tense place deep in his gut that had been knotted ever since he’d left her apartment began to relax.

“There you are,” Milton’s voice boomed. “Get back in here, both of you. We’re only two lights shy of every single compound.”

Reg met Milton’s dark eyes over the top of Faith’s head. “We’ll be there presently.”

“Five minutes, no more,” Milton admonished and trotted back into the room.

“We can go inside now,” Faith said. “From what I understand, tonight belongs to you. You should be where everyone can applaud you.”

“Not before I’ve kissed you. Just for the record, the only one whose acclaim I ever wanted was yours.” Reg tilted her head and closed his mouth over hers. He kept the kiss brief, just enough to reinforce their earlier passion. He felt his body come to life when she opened her mouth to his probing tongue. Faith wrapped her arms around him, holding him close, and his heart took flight. She might have felt betrayed, but she still cared about him.

She moved her mouth away from his. “I’m glad you didn’t run away forever when I told you to go.”

He kissed the tip of her nose and let her go. “It’s one of the curses of being a scientist. I draw my own conclusions—even if they fly in the face of evidence to the contrary.”

“So you didn’t give up on me? On us?”

“Oh hell, no. You’d have had to do a whole lot more to chase me off than you did. Come on. Milton may have made going back inside the room sound like a suggestion, but it was actually an order. He gets far less jovial when people don’t follow his instructions.”

Faith rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I’ve seen him in a temper. Lots of times.” She wriggled out of his embrace, but laced her fingers in with his, and they headed back into the conference room.

“Come up to the front with me,” Reg murmured low next to her ear.

Faith shook her head. “I’m going to sit next to the women.”

“So long as I can find you once we’re done here, that’s—”

“Oh no, you don’t, you cocksuckers,” Frank roared.

Reg jolted to attention. What the hell had happened?

“Go on.” Faith let go of his hand and hustled toward where the women were.

Everyone in the room had bolted to their feet and were moving toward the screen. Reg stared at it as the flashing white lights flickered and died, one by one. Had the GAs changed their minds?

“I’ve got this,” Frank shouted, typing with frantic speed into a keyboard Reg assumed was linked with the CIA mainframe.

“I’m helping,” Tony said. “Won’t hurt if they hear it from both of us.”

“Hear what?” Milton bellowed. “Will one of you fill me in on what the fuck just happened?”

“My best guess,” Roy said, “is one of those two compounds who refused our offer engaged the sequence to start the Doomsday key counting down.”

“That’s exactly right.” Frank never looked up from his keyboard.

“Can’t you hack into the damned thing and abort it?” Milton demanded.

“No,” Tony said. “What we can do is give each compound the code that will terminate the operation at their end.”

“All they have to do is feed it into their individual mainframes,” Tony said. “It will recognize the self-destruct instructions and defeat them.”

“Jesus!” Milton clamped his jaw into a tight line. “Did any of you memorize the pattern on that board? So I can determine which compounds to blow out of the water.”

“We probably all did,” Honor spoke up.

“Yeah,” Charity broke in. “One was that place in Maine where we chased everyone out of the bunker. The other was where I assume they moved their headquarters. It would have to be for them to have access to the master computer to start the countdown.”

“Where exactly is that?” Reg asked.

“West Texas, a few miles north of Ft. Stockton,” Roy replied.

Reg walked to where Frank and Tony sat, still typing like madmen. Lines of code rolled across their screens. The longer he stared at it, the closer it came to forming a pattern that made sense until something shifted, and he could read it just like any language.

He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, and looked again. The code was still legible. Would this be another benefit from the infusion?

Frank blew out a frazzled breath and leaned back. “Now we wait. Again.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing more you can do?” Milton stalked over. “How long is the latency between when they activate Doomsday and everything blows up?”

“Don’t know,” Tony answered. “Probably not long, though. The whole point is genocide. If they gave people even half an hour, some would probably decide they had zero interest in being part of someone’s poison Kool Aid pact.”

“If you think of anything,” Reg said to Frank and Tony. “Anything at all, sing out.”

“Nothing more we can do.” Frank’s usual smartass demeanor had fled, leaving naked anguish stenciled into his features. “I was so sure we had this.”

“I was too,” Tony said. “We thought we knew our people, but we’re more than machines and capable of acting out of character.”

“No shit,” Frank muttered. “I didn’t exactly factor that into any of the probability models.”

Reg opened his mouth to say something about them trying their best, but it might not go over well, so he settled for, “Thanks. Sometimes no matter how hard I tried to save someone, they died anyway. It’s not a good feeling. I’ve wasted a whole lot of time running scenarios detailing how I could have done things differently. But my patient was just as dead.”

Frank quirked a brow. “That’s a decent analogy.”

Reg made his way toward where Milton and Roy stood dead center watching the blank display. The women formed a group off to one side. Everyone wore grim expressions, and the women were conversing telepathically. The air around them held a luminous aspect, and electricity crackled. Faith and Charity had their heads together. So did Honor and Glory.

Reg’s hands were balled into fists so hard his hands ached. He knew he was wound tight, but the fists surprised him. He flexed his fingers and skirted the back of the group, heading for Faith.

She nodded solemnly at him. “Won’t be much longer,” she said. “Either the board will light up again. Or not.”

Glory turned to him, her pain palpable. “Almost all the compounds have nurseries and incubators where they’re growing babies.”

“Makes sense,” he replied. “It also means there are older children.”

“Yes,” Honor concurred. “The normal kids—not the ones who got culled—are all sent to a handful of compounds when they’re around five. The original idea was to keep them in specialized children’s units until they were maybe thirteen or fourteen.”

“At which point, they’d be returned to their home compound,” Charity said.

“We never actually got to that point because the oldest kids in those units are around twelve now,” Faith added.

Reg had been watching the board intently. “Look!” he pointed at a flashing white light somewhere in central Oregon. “Frank and Tony saved at least one compound.”

Before his words were out, lights flared all over the board. Whoops and cheers filled the room. Except from Milton. He could have been carved from stone, with his gaze trained on the display.

“Did we get everyone who was here before?” he growled.

Frank pushed in next to him, scanning the flashing lights. “Almost,” he said. “We’re missing one here.” He tapped a spot in eastern Tennessee. “And here.” He pointed at northern Oklahoma. Almost as if his finger urged it to life, the Oklahoma light began flashing bright white.

“Not good enough,” Milton growled. “I do not want anyone snared in a mass suicide pact who didn’t sign up for it. Raise that Tennessee compound on the phone.”

Frank pulled a cell phone from his back pocket and tapped on its display.

“That’s not a CIA issue phone,” Milton snarled.

“Really?” Frank angled an incredulous look his way. “You’re going to give me grief over that?” Without waiting for an answer, he began talking to whomever had picked up on the other end, rattling off the code sequence.

After a long, gut-wrenching moment, the Tennessee light popped to life, and Milton exhaled briskly. “I’d deploy fighter jets to annihilate the GAs who activated the Doomsday sequence, but—”

“No need.” Frank glanced up from his call. “We saved Tennessee with like thirty seconds to spare. The other two compounds just exploded, including headquarters, which isn’t a bad thing. I do have a question, though. The man I’m talking with wants to know what happens next.”

“How many are you, total?” Milton asked.

Frank fed the question into his phone. A moment later, he replied three thousand eight hundred sixty-seven.”

“Have him tell you how many are children,” Glory called from across the room.

“He already did,” Frank replied. “Six hundred eleven.”

Milton squared his spine. “What happens next depends on what they want. I’d like everyone to show up in DC, but that might not be practical.”

“It would work if we did it in groups,” Tony said.

Milton held out his hand for the phone. Frank handed it to him, saying, “Watch it. It’s not CIA issue.”

“Shut up,” Milton growled before angling his mouth over the speaker and activating it to make the conversation public. “Milton Reins here,” he said. “I run the Central Intelligence Agency. Please give every single genetically altered human my personal guarantee regarding their safety. You do not have to run or hide any longer. We’ll find homes and jobs for you. See that your children attend school and are raised in families.”

“What if some of us wish to remain in our compounds?” the man on the other end of the line asked.

“Fine by me,” Milton said. “We’ll see that you have vehicles and driver’s licenses, and jobs so you can buy the things you need.” He paused a beat. “If any of you would like to work for us, we always have spots for scientists, doctors, computer gurus. We’re also always recruiting for every branch of our military. The gates are wide open. Speaking on behalf of the U.S. government, we did you a great disservice. Allow us to rectify it.”

“That goes double from me.” Reg cupped a hand near his mouth to project his voice across the room.

“Who was that?” the man on the phone asked.

“Dr. Thomas, the V2 scientist in the podcast we sent to all your computers,” Milton replied.

“We all want to meet him. I’ll spread the word, sir,” the man said. “How can we reach you with our decisions?”

Milton glanced at Frank and Tony, who nodded in unison. “I’m going to hand the phone back to Frank, one of your geneticists who works for us. He’ll figure out the fine points of how this will roll out.”

“Got it, sir. Thank you.”

“Drop the sir,” Milton said. “Unless you come to work for the CIA.” He handed the phone to Frank, who huddled over its speaker with Tony.

Honor linked a hand under Milton’s arm. “Looks like an unmitigated success.” She beamed. “The war is finally over.”

“Moving in that direction,” Milton said in his usual gruff tones. “Moving in that direction at least for this war. There’s always another. We’ve done all we can for tonight. Time to turn in.”

Faith edged closer to Reg. “Maybe,” she murmured near his ear, “if there are a whole lot of us, normal humans won’t be scared anymore.”

“It runs deeper than that,” he told her, enjoying the trust spilling from her eyes. Something he never thought he’d see again.

“What do you mean?” She drew him away from where they’d been standing. The tight knot of women had dissipated. Glory and Roy were heading out of the room. Honor kept a hand firmly on Milton, and Charity hovered near Tony.

“When Charity came to find you, did she tell you I had an infusion to make me more like you?” At Faith’s nod, he went on. “This is a new mixture. At least so far, it seems powerful and easy to tolerate. My best guess is every single person who serves in any military or law enforcement capacity is going to want the augmentation.”

“I get it.” Faith’s expressive features gleamed with understanding. “There will be so many who can do exactly what we can, no one will think twice about it anymore.”

“Exactly.” He threaded an arm around her waist. “Ready to come home?”

“With you?”

He nodded. “With me. I apologize in advance for my living quarters. I’ve never spent much time there. Mostly I’m at the infirmary.”

“We could come back to my apartment—at least for tonight.” She offered a shy smile.

“You’re inviting me back? After kicking me out.”

Faith elbowed him. “I am, but you’d better decide quickly. The offer just might self-destruct in—”

He laughed. “You, my love, have watched one too many episodes of Mission Impossible.”

“You’ve got my number. This is going to be fun.”

He herded her from the room. Frank and Tony were still deep in conversation with the man from Tennessee. “What will be?”

“Getting to know each other.”

“Fun and exciting and scary sometimes. I never wanted anyone in my life as much as I want you. When you ran me out a few hours ago, I was devastated.” He held the stairwell door and they walked down the stairs, hips bumping companionably.

Faith eyed him as they walked outside. “You made a pretty good recovery.”

“On the surface. I’m used to running a steamroller over my emotions so they can’t get in the way. It’s one of the things you’ll need to help me with.”

“Deal.” Faith stuck out her hand.

He grasped it. “What’d I just agree to?”

She grinned, her face illuminated by a nearby streetlight. “Oh yeah. The quid pro quo part. I have a temper. And up until Charity showed up in my apartment, I needed a fairly harsh reality check.”

Reg drew her into his arms. “We’ll figure it out as we go.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “I have a car here, or we could walk.”

“Let’s take the car. The faster we get to my apartment, the quicker we’ll be back in bed.”

He splayed his hands across her back. “You liked that, did you?”

She nodded. “A whole lot. That’s why we need to do it again. To make certain what happened earlier wasn’t a fluke.”

“It wasn’t.” He spun her in his embrace and pushed her gently toward where he’d left the car. “Come on, my little vixen. I may have created a monster.”

“Would you still like me if I demanded sex every day?”

“Oh yeah. Not much you could do that would make me not care about you. Faith, darling.” He opened the passenger door and tucked her inside.

When he came around and got in, she said, “I like it when you call me that.”

“Good. Because you are my darling.”

Her smile crumpled.

Alarmed, he asked, “What’s wrong?”

“The hearing. For those men we killed. I’d forgotten about it. What if it goes sideways? Maybe we shouldn’t spend any more time together until after—”

“Ssht. It will be fine. Trust me on that.” He started the car and drove across the darkened campus.

“Do you really think so?”

“I know so, and I’ll never lie to you. If I thought you had reason to worry, I wouldn’t hide it.” He pulled into a parking place and killed the engine, but didn’t open the car door. “Tonight is for us. What happened back there when almost all the compounds chose life over destruction was a victory.”

“I thought so too,” she said, a catch in her voice. “I didn’t truly believe they would.”

“It’s because you misjudged the men.”

“I know. That was one of my less attractive insights. I came to terms with it on my way across campus.”

“Can we leave all that here in the car?” Reg cupped her face in one hand. “When we go inside, I want it to be just you and me.”

“I can do that. Will you stay all night?”

“What’s left of it.”

She pushed her door open. “Guess that means we need to hurry.”

“This won’t be our only night together, Cinderella. Just the first of millions.” Reg got out and came around to her side of the car, closing her door once she was in his arms.

“Millions,” she echoed. “I like the sound of that.”

“Good. Get moving, darling. A man could freeze out here.”

“Not with me in your arms you won’t.”

He linked an arm through hers and guided her to her door, following her through. Visions of a naked Faith cascaded through his mind, and he loped up the stairs after her. The way he was feeling, they’d end up fucking like bunnies on the living room floor.

“Great imagery.” She tugged him through her open door.

He realized she’d been in his mind. “Pretty soon,” he said and kicked the door shut, “I’ll be able to do that too.”

“I can’t wait. Now about that living room floor idea…”

Reg pulled her hard against him and crushed his mouth over hers.